The Paper http://wearethepaper.org/

Several pointed reminders that the events planned for later today in Central London are eagerly anticipated:

“It is in the public and your own interest that you do not involve yourself in any type of criminal or antisocial behaviour. We have a responsibility to deliver a safe protest which protects residents, tourists, commuters, protesters and the wider community. Should you do so we will at the earliest opportunity arrest and place you before the court.” Signed by Simon Pountain, the Met commander ‘in charge’ of policing tomorrows demonstration.

“this evening’s British Evening Standard publicised 8 threats those marching tomorrow: you will be baton rounded, you will be expelled, you will lose your job, you will be restricted from travelling abroad, you will be thrown out of university, you will be sacked, you will be run over by a Jankel, you will be arrested. Kettling is, like, so last year… See you in the streets!”

David Cameron said on Tuesday he would not criticise the police if they felt it was necessary operationally to use rubber bullets on the student demonstrators.

“The city is misty and eerily quiet tonight and a comet has appeared in the west… traditionally an omen of war and insurrection…”

We will be handing out copies of the new edition of The Paper. See you on the streets (and it will be online soonish).

Like this:

Reflecting on The Paper as a very serious play at theatre; the political as a theatrical serious playing at paper, and 1001 stories to tell, in pictures.

JOHN HUTNYK

As bombs still rain down on Libya, with cockpit-cam night video peep-show footage of tanks being destroyed to preserve the No-Fly Zone on our 24-hour news (since tanks might fly?), we should probably have a discussion about images. David Cameron has evoked that old ‘line in the sand’ crusader cliché, and the TUC and NUS have worried about ‘hijacks’ and hi-jinx stealing their place on the day (N10, M26). But, a hijack means crashing a plane into the Twin Towers, not smashing a window – though both can be media events as well. Hijacking the UN and NATO to invade entire countries on pretence is of a different order of obfuscation – and the comic image of a President in combat gear reading stories to children does not quite register. On our part, we have had debates about images in the movement and in The Paper. Our discussion should and has extended to file images in other papers and media, and the convoluted political uses on several sides (and yes, we have been taking sides). So, what should we say about the image of images, what is the story with pictures worth a thousand words, what do we see when we open the photoshop, diorama, kaleidoscope of viewing to question?

The Millbank boot–window-demonstrator assemblage was reproduced many times. I particularly like the aesthetic, though of course it is a little bit pantomime. I also like to tell the story of watching the live BBC coverage of the December 9 demonstration as ‘anarchists’ stormed The Treasury. Early in the evening my two-year-old son was also watching when the police roughly handled a protester dressed as Santa Claus and bundled him aside. My son was shouting at the telly: ‘time out Santa, time out!’, having learnt at nursery that a cool-down period is necessary after a dispute over Lego blocks or whatever. With the kettle in place, the BBC camera then showed a police liaison constable directing photographers away from the action with the words: ‘Have you got the pictures you want? Then move along…’ Showing Santa storming The Treasury in a recession was not an ideal front page however, and so instead about a half hour later the sticking of the Prince’s ride in Regent Street was staged to grab the headlines.

The pantomime quality of such striking imagery is well known, and of course, in The Paper we have sought images with a punctum, or with irony, poignancy and politics. We have debated whether images of ‘protesters in Tahrir’ were problematic because the said protesters did not speak (photogenic credibility?), were possibly put in danger (military reprisals?), were wearing headscarves (exotica?), or were there as examples of revolt that we wished we had here (revolutionary tourism?). I think on the whole our discussions have moved us towards a more nuanced appreciation of images, and from the start we have included line drawings, illustrations, cartoons and art. My favourite is itself a claim for credibility, exotic and touristic all at the same time – the image of the boot that appears above the ‘Bosom of Fear’ article in the pink issue. This boot picks up – fashion editors love this kind of attention to accessories – an echo of the line drawings and photos of slippers in the issue that has images from Tahrir. That works for me.

Less successful were the two facing pages with pictures of Obama/Qaddafi and Mubarak/Qaddafi. These were overly literal and would only have ‘worked’ if the whole issue had been a relentless compilation of all the images of other Western leaders that had wined and dined with the Lion of Libya. We have discussed imagery that tells a story, but we also want multiple strands of narrative and subtlety in the pictures. The projection of scenes that complicate and deepen analysis, that step away from simple realism, that offer a provocative or contrary take on the expected, images that debate each other, that suggest reverie and thinking, or even that confuse, if they do so with intent. The Paper need not always adopt the one plus one platitudes of the commercial press. We can take inspiration from homemade placards from the rallies and the innovations of high art photography (Mapplethorpe and Cartier-Bresson as our gods) and tamper with each. Barbara Kruger could design a great issue, with text over picture and a wry cunning. We have had people send in their drawings, we have cultivated our own cartooning skills – and a cartoon certainly speaks in different ways in the press, there is something about the border around a cartoon that both enables anything to be said and disarms it as merely a joke. We have mostly avoided borders (of course, borders are rules).

We will multiply images, and always take sides, even with ambiguity.

The pantomime scene of marauding anarchists shopping at Fortnum&Mason which terrorized the nation (ahem) is just as much a shibboleth as the multiple images of Saddam that were presented in the lead up to the Iraq war (the playing cards) or the mysteries of the taped voice of Osama bin Laden beamed in via smuggled cassette from the caves of Afghanistan. These folds in the ideological compendium are the ones that pantomime must decode for children. Scheherazade is the ur-story here, telling fables of Ali Baba, Sinbad and Aladdin over and over, so as ultimately to disarm the power of the despot Shahryar. Only now such a figure is trapped, detained and deported, she is forced to wear an orange jump suit and tell her tale to interrogators in Guantanamo. Perhaps we can imagine her contributing to The Paper as well. Undoing the imagery of death with joyous picture narrative and creative interpretation. Fearless exposure of truth to power and spectacular adventures for all.

and as an addendum: an off list conversation with my comrade Amit about this text that we decided might be worth putting on line as well:

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Dear John:

I wanted to share some thoughts with you about this, because I think for myself I wanted to clarify some of your arguments.

One is the relation between image and narrative.

Second is the relation between image and taking sides.

Third is the relation between image and the exotic.

And Fourth is the relation between image and body.

1. I think images should disrupt narrative processes, not tell a story. If an image is the Barthesian punctum as you suggest, then perhaps this needs to become something other than a relation to a story, diegesis, a linearity. Images can operate as a way to detour a narrative, swerve it from its intentions, potentialize a story. Central here is the relation of image to consciousness and thus to the project of consciousness raising. Can images do something to consciousness such that it is brought to confront its own materiality?

2. I agree we need to take sides, and even sometimes (frankly, more and more) without irony (!). But what are the sides we have defined? Its certainly more complicated that left and right, right? To me one of the sides I would like an image to take is against habit and cliche, is that a side in the way you would define it? I don’t know. But certainly I think creating images that jam habits and cliches is a political project, a project as well that moves us to confront memory, attention, craving, and desire in a way that is fully historical and even neurological.

3. The exotic is a habit in the West, bell hooks called it eating the other. I have been in the UK for about 9 months now, which is not very much, but enough to register forms of exoticism on my own not very exotic brown skin in a particularly British mode. But its only brown, what about black and yellow and green? I am not being facetious or ironic. I lack these skills, frankly. I think the question of the relation of how an image tells a story given the exoticism of the other, is to focus on what I suggested in 2. : habit and cliches. I think the paper needs to intervene in the habits and cliches of the exotic precisely because that practice will call us to develop different material relations with populations that not only can speak (Spivak was I believe mistaken about the politics of representation, which has more to do with her commitment to Derrida and Heidegger than with politics itself), but can affect (through their material movements, their cultures, their histories, their language, their desires) the habituations of the West unto crisis. They already have, again and again, but these crises have been managed, repressed, incorporated, and abjected. Can we agree that this is also a dimension of neoliberal “democracy”: integrating the exotic? But maybe these postcolonial processes are not speaking to the West at all? Maybe these processes are not of the nature of language but of the nature of a material transformation in life chances, resources, emotional tonality, habits of the embodied mind, new ecologies of gestures, hesitations, passions, work, communication, and affects.

4. An image can also be a variable quanta of sensation, with its own durations, foldings, hesitations, pulsations. That is why it can also touch the flesh directly, not through narrative, or consciousness, but through a kind of de-habituation taken to the n-th degree. Where an image is first and foremost not a signifier floating off into the ether of other signifiers but an event, a vector, a tendency in an ecology of sensation. This is not a metaphor. It is a politics of the image that necessitates we take the embodiment of images literally, such that the politics of the image becomes an ethology of compositions between at least two multiplicities: your body (with its cultural, biological, neurological, psychic, gendered, sexed, raced, classed, etc. histories all as variable dimensions of change and habit in and of that body) and a set of sensory motor circuits (i.e. the image).

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Reply:

Hi Amit

Thanks for this. Good good points.

I’m in the middle of marking hell, so this won’t be as nuanced as I’d like, but I can respond to a couple of things.

First up – not in your order of preference necessarily, but most crucial I think – exoticism. I could not agree with you more about this – there is great need to challenge the way the exotic masquerades in this country as an alibi for racism. No, worse than racism, its white supremacy (I guess that’s the same thing) which presents itself as some sort of tolerant liberal benevolent civilized pig-ignorant delusion. It is part of a two step routine though – a love-hate routine – ooh, exotic, culture, music, drums, saris, slightly problematic face veils and arranged marriages but great food hmmm, yum… dust, heat, sand, sun, tourism… lets get a bargain holiday out of it after we bomb you into such a state that the best you can do is provide service economy facilitation of my self deluded cultural sophistication. Lonely Planet Tony Wheeler has long been planning a new Guidebook for Afghanistan. Here in London, on the one hand in the city there are anti-racist groups with anti-nazi badges interested in hip hop and south asian dance music, Chandra/Seth/Roy/Rushdie novels and chicken tikka masala, while in the adjacent burbs there are racist attacks, paki-bashing, support for State terror, detention, islamophobia and worse (Sandline etc). Exoticism is the mild but pernicious end of white supremacism that kills.

But I certainly don’t think all images that tell stories are always helpful. Indeed, usually the story is a nightmare of a narrative that belongs to ideology and control. For example, the pantomime terror narrative being played out today – Osama and his alleged Pakistani collaborators defeated by a President of “USA USA” finally come good and the world made safe not-quite for thirty more years of this spurious war as ‘it will take a generation to defeat Al Qaeda’… OK, that said, images even when disruptive tell a story. I was watching the news tonight and even while the white house spokesperson was praising Obama for the ‘most courageous call any president has made in x years’ the background image was of black-clad Taliban-type figures in training (and in trainers) – there are a couple of stories there, depending on your interpretive stance. For some, it showed that there was a threat, no doubt for others that there still is a threat, for still others, perhaps that training still goes on, and then a little postmodern nuance in the shoes they were wearing. Finally, a text underneath reports that its expected a posthumous Osama tape is about to be released. Despite efforts on all sides, we cannot control the story. But putting out ambiguous images/story is not sufficient, but I think pushing for an understanding of the interpretive power of images is important. Scheherazade is my emblem for someone knowing how to do that (my unfinished book Pantomime Terror uses the Scheherazade frame to retell some of the same stuff I worked on with Critique of Exotica). Thing is, all images also tell a story. What we need a nuanced stories – more Scheherazade’s…

However, I don’t get what you say about Spivak in brackets. ‘(Spivak was wrong!)’. What do you mean? Her argument is not that the subaltern cannot speak as such, but that in the dominant discourse, even when taken up by well-intentioned advocates of speaking, the story that is heard is already scripted, always-already heard. If anyone, Benita Parry had got this wrong, but so do many others when they think that Spivak would deny people a speaking voice when she is, rather, making a critique of ventriloquy. And is recognizing a necessity of such ventriloquy I think as well – once the subaltern is on the path to speaking that voice is shaped by structures like representative democracy (and its corruptions) rational codes (and its distortions) media platforms (and commodifications) etc. etc. The clarification Spivak provides in the two rehashes of that essay – ‘Subaltern Talk’ interview in The Spivak Reader, and the whole last section of Critique of Postcolonial Reason are crucial returns to that material. Spivak even explains why the declarative ‘the subaltern cannot speak’ was an infelicitous remark. Its a bit like the way Sartre was criticized for including the line ‘Hell is other people’ in his play Huis Clos (No Exit). People completely overlook that this was said by a character in a play and not what Sartre thought about the world. But then now I’ve deployed Sartre out of context, remembering Nandy’s contribution to this where he said that Fanon had written in the language and tones of Sartre. Well, he was saying something pretty different…

Ahhh, this little ramble is already too long. And have not even got to the taking sides or the image-body bits. I think you are exactly right about irony. But all I can say today is: No to taking sides with assassinators of any stripe….

red salute

John

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Amit to John:

I mean something very specific when I say that Spivak was wrong. But it is not about Spivak’s work, as such. It is about the politics of representation, and why that politics (even, one might say especially, in postcolonial criticism–I am writing a piece now that I’m calling the Migrant and Mobile Phone: Toward a Postcolonial Empiricism that aims to address precisely this problem) has formed a closed loop around representation and consciousness, why questions of sensation, habit, sensory-motor circuits, neurology, duration, intensity are not only relegated but cast as politically suspect. It is about a dogmatism of the image–I realise this is not your position, and from what you say above, I have a lot to learn from your work. But you see if the conversation–and is it a conversation, is it discourse if what we are working through is crucially the experience of sensation in a new practice of the image–is going to move beyond the binary sign, into another experimentation with signification, then maybe the image should be seen as something between a representation and a thing? Something with materiality, but also a kind of spirituality (an image inhabits and is inhabited by tendencies, affects which, while real, are never fully, and sometimes never at all actualized, the image is virtual and actual at once). But again let us return to the point at hand: images do things. You and I both agree about that. They are involved in a political practice the meaning of which is not pre-given but unfolds in the doing of it.

Like this:

We all cross swords on what we’re fighting against, but what do we want to rally for? This is an invitation to counter the ‘news’ of the now with forecasts for alternative futures.

If only this rally were not just today, and not just from here to there – but all day, all month, and everywhere, all the time. Radical democracy to replace the 40-hour (let’s face it, often 60+) work week and the boredom/grim tedium of struggling to pay rent, to survive precarity, ducking and diving, constrained by rules. We could make it different. Say: step one, all senior management incomes (corporate heads, bank bonuses, tax evaders, military budgets, piggy-polly perks etc) to be redistributed as a democracy premium to allow all people to be involved in all decisions, all the time. The permanent forum of the Festival Hall as an open-access debating chamber. The budget of the Royal Household deployed for the National Health Service, and the Palaces made into hospices or welcome centres for refugees. Draft legislation on the abolition of the Trident nukes as the next order of business; thereafter, no colonial bombings abroad and free (and more!) public transport at home. Breakout meetings to propose alternatives to roads – not just cars, the entire road system to be rethought. Also, housing – communal luxury-squatting in the meantime, and a shuttle bus service to the daily demo… things like this, at the very least.

I know the idea of a permanent debating forum is a bad dream for some, but given the current bland waking nightmare of now – the continuous drip-feed of non- informative news coverage, the fake choices, spray-on TV tans, and our false participation in plastic democracyTM – well, its just not fit for use, is it?

Critical support for the organisations and all that, but a timid trade union movement that would only march from A to B has not yet learned the media politics of Millbank or Tahrir. A smashed window or a traffic jam is not news, but a rallying cry – and if there is no alternative but the tweedledum and tweedledum of parliamentary illegitimacy, such a trades union movement has set its sights too low. Indeed, it has already capitulated, when we could do so much more. I would not rush to say ‘you can’t kettle chaos’, but talk of feeder marches, breakout groups, the situ- diagrammatic imaginings, the (en)closures of Oxford Street, the counter-mappings, the myriad blocs – this bodes well as a fractal Party form.

As yet, the protest march ‘against cuts’ has not articulated a sufficient alternative – the political and social reorganisation that would end militarism and the arms sales that fuel it; that would reverse the devastation of the planet that comes with allegiance to outmoded technology, such as the combustion engine and its oil; or the dangers of the nuclear industry and opportunistic energy corporation initiatives to build on fault lines, in volcanic areas, or without due regard to renewables; undo the neo-colonial market imperative that returns food scarcity to the very regions that provide abundant foodstuffs for the bourgeois tables of Europe and the ‘developed’ west; against obscene detention and incarceration as punitive, racist population-cleansing, starting with the incredibly high proportion of Black Americans in prison in the USA, and the disproportionate working class population imprisoned in the UK, give or take a few white-collar criminals caught out in an expenses scandal or done for perjury; refusing opportunist use of ‘human rights’ as an ideological club to beat the non- West, while at the same time selling arms indiscriminately and pontificating about war as humanitarian intervention whenever a Western ‘leader’ needs a ‘legacy’ issue, pace David ‘Desert Rat’ Cameron; also: reparations for slavery, colonialism, sexism and homophobia (as democracy credits, seats in the front of the bus, agenda items of choice).

This list goes on. No expenditure on State visits, Freedom of Movement for all (restrictions on capital movement, a planned economy, a reserve fund for relief). Oppose all nationalisms, parochialisms, jingoisms… A NASA Mission to Mars, what bullshit! Instead, more engaging movies, romantic dramas about ageing communists, Regime Change on the Jedi Planet (the conservative clerics deposed) or The Bourne Conversion (to communism). For a political and popular culture that is not a festival of death. For a Life Extraordinary.

No to marching in lines.

Yes to running wild in the streets – we can sit down afterwards and work out how to do it all differently, again and again, that too can be fun. We just have to ask what is required to win a life like this, and more? What politics? What organization? What movement? More than a mere ‘like’ or ‘retweet’, or a one-day dawdle. Diagram this.